by Gary Paulsen
Had he known the true identity of the rifle but then been told that the original owner—a true Revolutionary War hero—died of dysentery on dirty straw spread on an earth floor, Tim would simply have remembered the first part and put the knowledge of the second part in the back of his mind and forgotten it.
But he didn’t know what the rifle was or where it came from, knew nothing of John Byam or how sweet the rifle shot or how many British officers it sent down.
He just knew it was old and might have some value, and he thought he would keep it, at least for a while. So he sprayed it lightly with preservative oil, including a squirt down the bore, wrapped it in a moisture-absorbent cloth, taped it all together, and propped it in the back closet of his motor home, and by the time he’d gone a hundred miles down the road heading west his thoughts were off the rifle and on to the day’s news, where he heard that a large religious encampment in Texas had been raided and burned and all the people killed in the action. He knew nothing except that they had been religious fundamentalists and had stored large numbers of and he could not see how that was grounds for an attack by the government—he viewed himself almost exactly the same as the Waco people—and made a mental note that it was just another reason to hate the government and what they were doing to people.
He had forgotten the rifle completely by the time the news special was over and again the rifle seemed to be destined to spend a long time in dark storage.
But everything counts in the timeline of history. Every little thing becomes absolutely vital to the future. So it was that if John Byam had not swallowed dirty water he might have lived many more years, or he might have died in combat, or of tuberculosis—which killed hundreds—or even died on a later day and that would have changed the time flow of the rifle and made its history totally different.
Just as now another slight bend in fate occurred. As he moved through a small town in Missouri the fuel pump on his motor home decided to give up the ghost and the huge machine stopped dead at an intersection next to a gas station.
It could have happened anywhere, anytime, but it didn’t. It happened almost in the driveway of the gas station and the man who owned the station was also an excellent mechanic. His name was Harvey Kline but everybody who liked him called him Harv, and since everybody who knew him seemed to like him, that had become his name.
He used a tow truck to pull the motor home up into the station parking area and soon found the problem was the fuel pump.
“How much to fix it?” Tim asked, and was stunned when, after calling the parts stores, Harvey said, “With labor it will come to close on four hundred dollars.”
“That’s too high.”
“The pump is over three. I’m not making much on labor.”
“I can’t afford it.”
This was a blatant lie. Tim had over twenty thousand dollars in cash and gold in the motor home, hidden in small bundles. But he lived in cash and he hated to spend it and he just knew that he could somehow dicker the price down or do a little bartering. “Would you take a trade?”
“What have you got to trade?” Harv asked, openly skeptical.
For a second Tim hesitated, but they were standing inside the station and he saw a picture on the wall showing a fresh-scrubbed Harv with his wife and two children, a boy eleven or so and the girl perhaps six or seven.
“Nice family,” Tim said. “That’s what makes America great—families.” And then the rifle popped into his head. He fought for the connection. Families, American, rifle—and he had it. “Family like that, you ought to have something for the future, something that will grow in value.”
“What have you got?”
“Just a minute, I’ll get it.” He went to the motor home and found the rifle in the back closet, took the rag off, and wiped it until it shone and carried it back into the garage.
“This is a true antique, a collector’s item. It’s worth over seven hundred dollars now and will continue to grow—there just aren’t any more being made.”
“It’s just an old gun,” Harv said, shrugging. “Heck, they’re all over the place.”
“This one”—Tim took a breath and lied, or thought he was lying—“was carried by a soldier in the Revolutionary War.”
“No—you’re kidding.”
“It’s a fact. I’ve had it for years, passed down in my family.” All lies, only based on a truth Tim didn’t know, as he didn’t know that the true worth of the rifle, if it were documented and being in the good shape it was in, might be in the neighborhood of ten or fifteen thousand dollars.
But if Tim was ignorant of the value of the rifle, Harv wasn’t. In a backward kind of way he understood the worth of the rifle, or at least hoped the rifle had worth that would grow. In truth, he was looking for something, anything that he could put money or work into that would grow and maybe help to save funds for his children when they went to school. That’s how he thought it: I need funds for the children’s college.
But he was a practical businessman as well and wasn’t about to take a loss, and he didn’t think the rifle was worth four hundred. “The rifle isn’t enough—I have to lay out money for the new pump.”
Tim waffled. “I don’t have anything else to trade.”
“How about a little cash and the rifle?”
Tim hesitated as if thinking it over—in truth he would sooner part with blood than cash—and while he was pausing he remembered the painting. It was on black velvet, a painting of Elvis riding a white wild horse. He had taken it in on trade thinking it might be worth something.
“I have an original oil painting.”
“Of what?”
“It’s Elvis, kind of riding a spirit horse, painted on black velvet so it just glows. I took it out of the frame and rolled it up, but you can tack it in a new frame.”
And that, wonderfully, strangely, is what did it. Harv, it turned out, was a rabid Elvis fan and when he saw the painting he fairly jumped at it.
By 10:15 that night he had the new fuel pump in the motor home and Tim was on the way out of town.
Harv set the rifle aside and looked at the painting and wondered how it could be that anybody could capture the King—the dark, brooding eyes, the half-smile—so perfectly on black velvet in colors that seemed to jump off the painting, and no matter which way he turned it the eyes still followed him.
He closed the station at eleven and was nearly out the door with the painting rolled up reverently under his arm when he remembered the rifle.
He took it from the corner, relocked the door, and walked four doors down the side street to where he lived in an old wooden-frame house, where he hung the rifle over the fireplace. His wife didn’t think much of it even when told that Tim had said it was a Revolutionary War weapon and she thought less of the painting of Elvis that he wanted to hang above the rifle over the fireplace.
But Harv didn’t care. He left the rifle on the nails he’d put in the wall above the mantle and stuck the rolled-up Elvis painting in the top of his bedroom closet until he could get a frame and went to sleep knowing in his heart that he’d done a good business for the day, and here the history of the rifle, in the present, would have ended again, the rifle lying on the nails waiting for the future except for one thing more.
Except for the boy.
The Boy
It is necessary to know this boy.
Born on a crisp fall morning, on October 13, he had some small sickness that made him keep getting ear infections. He seemed to be born pulling at his ear and running a fever, and his parents nearly died of worry when he developed fevers from the ear infection and had to be soaked in a tub of cool water to bring his temperature down to keep the convulsions away during the first two years of his life. Even then he was quiet and rarely cried unless there was a good reason, like the enormous needles they used for giving him shots to bring the fevers down from the ear infections.
Richard, they named him—Richard Allen Mesington, his first two names after his m
other’s father, who had never had a son and always wanted one. He was fourteen.
Richard had not always lived in Missouri. He’d been born in Colorado, where his parents lived while his father worked at construction, building houses to sell to the rich people who no longer wanted to live in the cities and moved to the mountains.
For his first six years he lived in a little town named Willow in the mountains west of Denver while his father worked on houses that looked like they belonged in the Swiss Alps.
His childhood was strange for a time because the couple had a small Border collie named Sissy and the boy bonded to the Border collie more than he did to the parents.
Sissy became his baby-sitter and in some ways his mother, and the boy spent many days in the summer wandering around their house clutching the shoulder fur on the collie while she led him to inspect things that dogs inspect—smelly places, interesting holes in the ground, scents on the wind.
He began to think dog in those days and sometimes, even until he was four, if he was in the yard and smelled a new odor or one that might be from a good taste, he would stop and turn his head to catch the smell on the wind the way a dog does it, trying to see in the direction of the odor, using the smell like a beacon. He, of course, could not smell as well as Sissy but he didn’t know that, and when she would stop to smell he would try as well, tottering alongside the dog, moving his nose this way and that to catch the smell.
What made it all stranger was the dog did not truly like the boy. She had been with the couple for two years before the birth of the boy and was jealous of the attention they gave to the child. Often when he had his ear infections and they would go to him in his crib at night, Sissy would stand in their way and try to use her shoulder to keep them from the boy so they would pay attention to her instead.
She would come to love the boy when he was older and she understood that he was simply an extension of the couple, come to love him so much she would have laid down her life for him, but not early, not when he was young. She tolerated the boy along her side, clutching at her hair, and sometimes growled lowly at him when he grabbed too hard and even lifted her lip to him now and then when he was too rough—though she would never, ever bite him—and without thinking led him out of the yard and into the surrounding forest several times.
These little trips terrified the parents, even though Sissy never took him over a hundred yards and he was never gone for over ten minutes. They lived outside of town in the mountains, on the edge of pine forests, and Sissy loved to explore and naturally pulled Richard along until he grew tired and stopped, holding hard to her fur and stopping her. The parents always found them that way, the boy standing or sitting, tired but quiet, not crying, looking at the woods around them with the dog standing next to him, Sissy not liking it, wanting to be free but caught by the bond of obligation that connects dogs—and especially collies—to humans.
Once she had taken him along a small brook and when the father came upon them, there was the track of a bear in the mud next to the brook and the dog had her hair up and the boy was looking at the green wall of the forest smelling, his nostrils flared and his eyes big, but he didn’t talk about what he’d seen or smelled until later that night in his crib.
“Big dog,” he said, because he didn’t know yet how all words worked. “In woods—biiig dog . . .”
When the couple moved to a different house—still in Colorado—there were more children about and he began to have friends other than the dog, and when he stopped hanging on her, the dog had become accustomed to the child being there all the time and stayed with him just the same. Many times the parents would look out the window to see the boy and a small friend playing with their toys in the sand at the side of the driveway and the Border collie sitting there, watching them intently, as if trying to help them play.
One day some heavy equipment moved into the lot next to them, up the side of a hill, and began pushing out dirt to build a house. There was a small bulldozer and a backhoe and a large truck to haul them, and the boy seemed mesmerized, almost smitten with love for the heavy equipment. As soon as he awakened each morning he would run outside and sit on the edge of the property with the collie next to him and watch the men drive the machinery and push the earth.
One morning one of the men came to the house and asked to use the phone to call a concrete truck to keep it from coming because they weren’t ready for it. He was a husky man with a tee shirt that barely covered his muscles and was indescribably, to the boy, wonderfully dirty. The man had seen Richard watching them work and he liked children—had two of his own—and he asked the boy’s mother if the boy could come up and ride the machinery.
She hesitated at first but saw the excitement in Richard’s eyes and decided it would be all right if she went with him and stood to the side to make sure he was all right.
The boy rode both the Cat and the backhoe, and the man let him pull one of the levers on the backhoe to dump the earth from the bucket, and that night when his father came home from work he tried to tell of the excitement of the day but it all jumbled in his mind and mouth and all he could manage was one sentence:
“When I get big I want a bughoe.”
And while he still could not formulate the words, he knew then that when he grew if he could just be a driver of heavy equipment and move earth and flatten mounds, there could and would be nothing finer. That Christmas, Santa—he still believed in Santa and would until he was nearly six and saw two Santas, one relieving the other in a shopping mall—brought him heavy metal toys, a truck and a backhoe that picked up dirt to dump in the truck, and for two complete summers he could be found at the edge of the driveway each day, the collie sitting next to him while he made roads, and this would last until he was taken to a dinosaur museum by his grandfather, who loved him so much it was nearly a visible glow. Then the boy wanted to be an archaeologist, which lasted until he was nine and took a flight in a light plane and decided to be a pilot, and that lasted until he saw a show on television—they did not have a television until the boy was ten—about underwater diving and then he wanted to be a scuba diver and that lasted until he rode a good horse and decided to go to a ranch in Montana and be a cowboy and that lasted until . . .
He was much like his father, who worked hard all the time but moved from one thing to the next as he learned of them and was devoted and intensely loyal to each of the things as he did them before moving on to the next one.
It was not until the boy was seven that the family moved to Missouri, where the father had a job offer building cabinets and wanted to learn how to be a master carpenter.
In some respects the boy’s life in Missouri was the same as it had been in Colorado. They had a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and he had a yard to play in that was safe and the collie came with them. By now he had, of course, quit holding on to Sissy but she had changed drastically and loved him completely—possibly more even than his grandfather—and spent every waking hour watching him, waiting for him to move so she could be with him. She slept next to him on his bed, even went into the bathroom with him, and made him feel at home even though he was in a strange neighborhood where he didn’t know anyone.
On the right of their house there was a small frame dwelling painted a spotless white and occupied by an elderly couple. The boy heard that the man had been a fighter pilot in the Second World War but didn’t talk to him until he was of an age to make models, and the man came into his backyard and saw Richard holding a plastic model of a P-51 fighter near the low fence.
“I flew one of those,” the man told him, looking over the fence. “You had to be careful in a dive because if the airspeed exceeded the limits the aluminum would start peeling off the upper wing. That’s what happened to Johnnie . . .”
And the man told Richard stories of flying in the war, talking to Richard not as if he was a boy but a man, telling him things because he seemed to need to tell these parts of his life to somebody. Richard was fascinated and listened
raptly, and from that time on always said hello to the man when he saw him.
On the other side of Richard’s house lived Harv Kline. Harv was as nice to Richard as he was to everybody and Richard liked him as much as everybody liked him. He had two children, a boy and a girl, but the boy was three years younger than Richard—the girl still younger—and when Richard was eight the other boy was only five, too young for good playing. The fence between their two yards was only a foot high, a wooden rail, and anytime she couldn’t be with Richard, Sissy—who after the years with Richard had decided she was supposed to watch all young people—could be found in the Kline’s yard playing with and watching Harv’s two children.
There were other children on the block and Richard met them and came to know them and one of them became his best friend, a boy named Dennis, and another of them became his first girlfriend when he was nine years old. Her name was Peggy, and it wasn’t the same as when he became older, twelve and then thirteen when she became his real girlfriend but even so, even so this first girlfriend business was very serious and he spent hours talking to Dennis about it, telling Dennis how much he loved Peggy though he hadn’t told Peggy and indeed would not tell her of his love.
It was all very complicated and Richard thought twice that it would lead to breaking his heart because Peggy didn’t seem to notice him and he could not, for the life of him, bring himself to talk to her. He had found that until they moved to Missouri, his life without girls to play with, his life with Sissy the collie had left him almost debilitatingly shy when it came to talking to girls.
It is impossible to guess how long it would have taken him to tell Peggy how he felt but Dennis was a good friend and teasingly told Peggy that Richard loved her and she broke the ice by talking to Richard. She was thin and had a spray of freckles across her nose and straight brown hair that hung down alongside her face, and Richard’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth whenever she was near.